Emerson [Hardcover]

Lawrence Buell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2003

"An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote--and in this book, the leading scholar of New England literary culture looks at the long shadow Emerson himself has cast, and at his role and significance as a truly American institution. On the occasion of Emerson's 200th birthday, Lawrence Buell revisits the life of the nation's first public intellectual and discovers how he became a "representative man."

Born into the age of inspired amateurism that emerged from the ruins of pre-revolutionary political, religious, and cultural institutions, Emerson took up the challenge of thinking about the role of the United States alone and in the world. With characteristic authority and grace, Buell conveys both the style and substance of Emerson's accomplishment--in his conception of America as the transplantation of Englishness into the new world, and in his prodigious work as writer, religious thinker, and philosopher. Here we see clearly the paradoxical key to his success, the fierce insistence on independence that acted so magnetically upon all around him. Steeped in Emerson's writings, and in the life and lore of the America of his day, Buell's book is as individual--and as compelling--as its subject. At a time when Americans and non-Americans alike are struggling to understand what this country is, and what it is about, Emerson gives us an answer in the figure of this representative American, an American for all, and for all times.

(20031205)

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a splendid book, an important one, and one that will have wide appeal. This will be an indispensable book on Emerson, putting the keys to that complex man and his work into the reader's hand. If you want to know why we are still reading and talking about Emerson, start here.
--Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. (20031101)

Lawrence Buell has made it his business to set forth exciting new lines of inquiry. He has done so once again: bringing Emerson up to date, moving him away from a nation-based paradigm, and firing him up as an entry point to a global, cross-lingual circuit.
--Wai Chee Dimock, author of Empire for Liberty. (20031001)

This book is a literary-cultural event: the harvest of the past half-century of Emersonian revaluations and the harbinger, guide, and provocation for the next generations of Emerson scholars and critics. One cannot call a work on Emerson definitive, even provisionally, but I cannot imagine that any Americanist - or for that matter, anyone interested in America, specialist or non-specialist -- will be able to do without this book in the foreseeable future.
--Sacvan Bercovitch, author of The American Jeremiad, and The Puritan Origins of the American Self.

This a splendid book, an important one, and one that will have wide appeal. This will be an indispensable book on Emerson, putting the keys to that complex man and his work into the reader's hand. If you want to know why we are still reading and talking about Emerson, start here.
--Robert Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

Lawrence Buell has made it his business to set forth exciting new lines of inquiry. He has done so once again: bringing Emerson up to date, moving him away from a nation-based paradigm, and firing him up as an entry point to a global, cross-lingual circuit.
--Wai Chee Dimock, author of Empire for Liberty

This book is a literary-cultural event: the harvest of the past half-century of Emersonian revaluations and the harbinger, guide, and provocation for the next generations of Emerson scholars and critics. One cannot call a work on Emerson definite, even provisionally, but I cannot imagine that any Americanist--or, for that matter, anyone interested in America, specialist or nonspecialist--will be able to do without this book in the foreseeable future.
--Sacvan Bercovitch, author of The American Jeremaid and The Puritan Origins of the American Self

I learned from and greatly enjoyed reading Lawrence Buell's Emerson.
--Susan Sontag (Times Literary Supplement )

Lawrence Buell has written a comprehensive, penetrating and timely study, the distillation of a lifetime's scholarship, of this great thinker and writer, 'the poet of ordinary days,' as his disciple, John Dewey, beautifully called him.
--John Banville (Irish Times )

In this book Buell distills a lifetime of study and teaching on Emerson. Its tone is easy and confident, friendly and inviting, and Buell's aim is to share his admiration for America's first public intellectual with a new generation of readers.
--P. J. Ferlazzo (Choice )

In this book Lawrence Buell shows us why Emerson remains worth reading in our own time...What Buell has to say here about Emerson is not only persuasive but also consistently interesting, surprisingly original...and, best of all, written in straightforward, lucid language...Buell's discussion of the relationship between Emerson and his prize pupil, Henry David Thoreau, is brilliant.
--Daniel W. Howe (Common-Place )

About the Author

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; First edition (May 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674011392
• ISBN-13: 978-0674011397
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #989,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Anti-Tribal Emerson, April 15, 2004

By 

Robert S. Corrington (Madison, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emerson (Hardcover)

Lawrence Buell has written a capacious, sensitive, insightful, and vigorous book on the many facets of the thinker, poet, and activist, who most clearly showed North Americans a way past our provincialisms and a path toward a deeper alignment with the depth-powers of nature. I have studied and walked with Emerson for decades, and have, of course, read a number of biographies and critical studies of his endless multi-chambered mind. Like many I came up through those interpretations that focused on the real or alleged transformation that overtook Emerson with the untimely death of his son. After reading Buell's account of Emerson's trajectory, I have changed my views on just what Emerson was trying to tell us in his later essays like "Experience" and "Fate." These essays point more toward a seasoning of self-consciousness than toward a downward sinking into an eclipse of sacred energies. They augment and reshape the essays of the 1830s rather than force an abjection upon them.
In particular, Buell carefully works through the potential and actual correlations between Emerson and nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, especially the pragmatism of James and Dewey (but less so Peirce) and the later thought of Wittgenstein. He is, of course, aware of the writings of his colleague Stanley Cavell who highlights the, for him, fruitful interaction of Emerson and Wittgenstein. My own approach would stress the correlation between Emerson and a radicalized neo-Platonism (also discussed by Buell). Further, he goes into some detail about Nietzsche's multi-layered appropriation of Emerson's "Essays: First and Second Series." There has been much buzz about the Emerson/Nietzsche link and it is refreshing to see how Buell brings some precision to this rather astonishing historical nexus. Of special note are the detailed analyses of Emerson's political statements (and actions) during the 1840s and 1850s. Buell gives us an Emerson who was braver than often realized, yet who was at the same time often reticent to plunge full throttle into the battles around him. Both are true and both sides get ample treatment in this book.
Finally, I want to say a word about the writing style of this book. I am a philosopher, not a literary critic, and thus am used to stylistic expressions that can be, in turns, limpid, crystalline, or gnomic by comparison. I can report that Buell's literary style, and careful use of framing metaphors, is highly compelling and adds immensly to the verve and moving architecture of the book. I now have a revivified Emerson after reading this book--and that is as Emersonian a gift as one could wish for.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps not for the general public, December 27, 2004

By 

Michael Mcfarland (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Emerson (Hardcover)

The general reader may well be overwhelmed by the many references to philosophers from Plato to John Dewey and William James. The author, a professor of English at Harvard University, writes in a highly academic style that the general reader must slog through with a collegiate dictionary, but the chapter "Social Thought and Reform: Emerson and Abolition" should appeal to a broad audience, as well as the first chapter, "The Making of a Public Intellecual", and the material covering Emerson's relationship with Henry Thoreau in "Emerson as Anti-mentor" is quite interesting. The general reader may feel gratified to have read the entire book, but may struggle to comprehend much of it. If you are an erudite academic with degrees in philosophy and Western literature, you might even enjoy it.

In contrast to the obtuse style of writing in "Emerson" by Professor Buell, I would point the interested reader to "Understanding Emerson" by Kenneth Sacks, professor of History at Brown University. Professor Sacks writes with a clarity that would be appreciated by any reader, and I highly recommend "Understanding Emerson" for both general readers and the more specialized student of American thought and literature.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent study that, unintentionally, blocks access to Emerson himself, February 28, 2011

By 

M. J. Newhouse "Philoctetes" (Winchester, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Emerson (Paperback)

Prof. Buell has written a senstivie and fascinating study of Emerson. I have found it very helpful. It is seriously marred, however, by the fact that for all of his quotations of Emerson's works he cites to the volume and page number of Emerson's collected works, thereby making it impossible for a reader without access to the multi-volumned collected works (such as this reader) to know to which specific writings by Emerson the quoted statements belong. Thus, sadly and I am sure unintentionally, this study actually blocks a reader's ability to turn to Emerson himself, which I found as I read the book quite frustrating. Scholars, whatever their eminance, should know better than this. If the quotation comes from "Self-Reliance," please say so--don't just give volume and page number of the CW.